Friday 25 March 2011, Landelijk Seminarium @ Z011, CWI/Nikhef 11.15:
Speaker: Raju Vanugopalan (Brookhaven National Laboratory)
Title: Strong color fields in the little Bang: the Glasma, the Plasma and the approach to thermalization in heavy ion collisions
Abstract:
Heavy ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC produce QCD matter that flows like a nearly perfect fluid. How this perfect fluid is formed is an outstanding theoretical problem. We outline an ab initio treatment of early time dynamics of strong color "Glasma" fields in these collisions and describe interesting phenomena such as a "near side ridge" (seen both in A+A collisions at RHIC and in p+p collisions at the LHC) that provide insight into the Glasma. The possible key role of unstable quantum fluctuations in isotropization and hydrodynamic flow of the produced matter is discussed and open problems related to thermalization are outlined. Analogies to some aspects of inflationary dynamics in the early universe are noted.
link naar colloquia pagina